Eat My Charlotte

Recipe: Camembert-Pear Toast Points with Mint-Pistachio Pesto

Necessity isn't the mother of invention. Neither is hope, brilliance, ambition or anything else you'd find on one of those cheap-ass motivational posters in a dentist waiting room. Know what it really is? Boredom. Boredom is the mother of invention.

Think about it: When the first guy to invent the wheel thought of the damn thing, do you really think he stood up and yelled "Eureka!" (or the caveman-ish equivalent). Or do you think he sat there and thought "Man, transporting heavy things like this is a pain in the ass, I'm tired of it. Wheel."

Not that I have any measure of conclusive proof, but that's probably how it went. Same with gun powder ("I'm bored of nocking arrows"), the guillotine ("Drawing and quartering people is a pain"), and pretty much everything else.

And, yes, that extends to cooking, too. Especially cooking. Every sauce, condiment and preparation was made because someone was bored with the stuff they were eating, because they were bored with the way things were. Sure, the Thomas Kellers and Ferran Adriàs of the world really did come up with some fucking genius stuff, but I guarantee the thought they had before that was "I'm tired of eating fish the same way I always eat fish."

That's how I came up with a lot of these recipes, this one included. Hell, that's why I learned to cook in the first place. I was bored. I was standing around my kitchen and thought "I'm bored, I'm hungry, I have a pear."

It's not like this is something revolutionary, people. Someone's put French cheese on some bread with fruit on top, somewhere in the past. But whoever that first person was and me have the same thing in common: we were bored. Bread was too boring, fruit was too boring; something needed to change. Even if that something is just shoving some stuff into a food processor and spooning it on top.

See you next time.When Scott Greenberg isn't baking - which is pretty much never - he likes to obsess over music, play Street Fighter and yell at kids to get off of his lawn. You can find more of his recipes at Fresh Beats, Fresh Eats.